HSBC Declines to Comment on Report Geoghegan Threatened to Quit

HSBC CEO Michael Geoghegan made the threat as he was told the board wasn’t ready to appoint him to chairman, the Financial Times reported today, citing two people familiar with the discussions. Photographer: Jerome Favre/Bloomberg

Geoghegan made the threat as he was told the board wasn’t
ready to appoint him to the post, the Financial Times reported
today, citing two people familiar with the discussions. Paul
Harris, a London-based spokesman for HSBC, said the bank won’t
comment on “speculation.”

HSBC is looking for a chairman after Stephen Green resigned
to take a job as trade minister for the U.K. The bank will
probably appoint a successor at a board meeting in Shanghai
before the end of the month, a person with knowledge of the
situation said on Sept. 10. If the board decides not to promote
Geoghegan, the most likely candidate to succeed Green is John
Thornton, a former Goldman Sachs president who is chairman of
HSBC’s North American division, the person said.

“If Geoghegan doesn’t get the job now, he might not get it
at all and he would be very disappointed by that,” said
Christopher Wheeler, an analyst at Mediobanca SpA in London who
has a “buy” rating on the stock. “There is every possibility
that he threatened to resign.”

HSBC fell 1 percent to 664.5 pence as of 10:05 a.m. in
London, for a market value of 117 billion pounds ($183 billion).
The shares have fallen 6.2 percent this year.

Geoghegan, 56, replaced Green as CEO in 2006. He moved to
Hong Kong from London in February this year after working for
the bank for more than 35 years. Thornton, 56, joined HSBC as a
non-executive chairman of its North American unit in December
2008, six months after the division pushed the bank into the
biggest writedowns in its history.

Should the board decide to name Hong Kong-based Geoghegan
chairman, candidates to replace him include Asia CEO Sandy
Flockhart and Stuart Gulliver, who runs HSBC’s investment bank,
the person said on Sept. 10.